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I notice he doesn't afford his victim any generous assumptions.

He's like; fuck you for thinking the guy basing his $2000 computer purchase on cardboard is an idiot - I'm actually a secret genius CPU designer don't you know??

Well yeah like, maybe she's got a Master's degree in Packaging Design and knows that the smallest box, in fact, has weak cornering or cannot be reclosed because it has to be ripped open or something.

Is his request even well defined? There might be different, shortest, thinnest, shallowest boxes. Does it need to fit through a letterbox? Oh, ok, you don't care about depth then...

Not to mention the double meaning that "box" has in computing...

I noped out of the article at that point which is a shame because I do agree with the general idea.

> His disdain for his readers is pretty obvious from the fact that he puts zero effort into readability; there isn't an drop of formatting, it's just a massive wall of text from edge to edge of the browser window.

You can see this as disdain, or as respect: I'm free to bring my own CSS to this page, and have things look exactly how I want them too.

Also, it works great in portrait mode e.g on a phone.

I think he confused his trip to the Apple store with a riddle at a Google interview. I'll second that that made him sound like a complete dumbass.

He did say he's willing to look stupid.

I like the formatting, FWIW.

I don’t share your assumption that he purposefully made things more difficult.

My assumption is that he really didn’t know which computer came in the smaller box (since, computer size, which is the public info about the product, doesn’t exactly correlate with the box size).

My guess is that he wanted to know which, if any, impact a small box would potentially have on computer components (like different impact absorption on transportation) that would require some CPU design adaptation. Like (speculation here, as I am nowhere near a CPU specialist): is a second memory clip more susceptible to be affected by transportation impact? So the box size is correlated with cheaper computers. Which tend to be larger computers, but can come in a smaller box because they don’t have that second memory clip?

Idk, but I am assuming good intent and reasoning behind the anecdote.

"Hi, I'm doing research on $WHATEVER_IT_WAS, could you show me the computer you sell in the smallest boxes?" would prevent the confusion and awkwardness. It seems he gets out of his way to encounter these situations which is kinda rude.

I still liked the article, I certainly have a problem with trying to avoid looking stupid too hard, at least in certain contexts.

Yeah, exactly. I build weird machines, and I need parts that aren't designed for the weird machines (because nobody has built them before), so I usually go to unrelated shops.

Last time this happened, I needed steel wire, and I went to a guitar shop to buy guitar strings. I told the employee "this is going to be a bit weird but I want a string that is 0.3mm in diameter for a machine I'm building, do you have any?" instead of letting him be puzzled why I would want a "0.3mm string" rather than a "C string".

Usually people even ask and talk about about what I'm building, which is nice, but if it will take a long time to explain I say something like "it's not very easy to explain what it does because it's for a specialized purpose, but essentially it does <whatever general thing>".

I've never had anyone think I'm stupid, but not for lack of asking stupid questions, I think. I just take a little more care to spend two seconds explaining why I'm asking the thing.

There is nothing like the joy that lights up the face of a bored Home Depot employee when you say "looking for <weird thing>; it's for a kids costume". You can get several of them happily brainstorming alternatives and running around the store